


may your past be the sound of your feet upon the ground

by Hibou_Gris



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Child Abuse, F/M, Gen, Healing, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 08:35:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17280692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hibou_Gris/pseuds/Hibou_Gris
Summary: "You can't run away from yourself.""Maybe you'd be running towards yourself."





	may your past be the sound of your feet upon the ground

**Author's Note:**

> I used the child abuse tags because there is a brief description of young Davos being slapped by his mother, and references to past abuse in regard to Davos, Danny, Ward and Walker. There are no other graphic descriptions of abuse in the story.
> 
> This is more of five separate scenes loosely connected by theme rather than one cohesive story, so it jumps around a lot both temporally and tonally.
> 
> The title is from the song "Carry On" by Fun. The matter summary is from Ward and Danny's conversation on the jet in the final episode of season 2.

“Where is that boy?” His mother means Danny. She rarely calls him by his name.

“I don’t know,” Davos says, dropping his eyes. He doesn’t know, but he can guess, and he’s sure his mother can as well.

His mother clips him around the ear, and Davos ducks away, holding in the yelp he wants to make. “Don’t just stand there uselessly, go find him!”

“Yes, mother,” Davos says. He backs away, but his mother catches him by the arm, her grip painfully tight. She leans down over him, forcing him to meet her eyes.

“Davos,” she says. “Do not come back here without him, or there will be consequences.”

“Yes, mother,” Davos repeats. She releases his arm, and he hurries off down the corridor, and doesn’t look back.

 

He finds Danny an hour later, far down one of the mountain paths. “Danny,” Davos calls, and Danny drops his head and stops walking, waits for Davos to catch up.

“You can’t make me go back,” Danny says, angry and mulish, his words thickly accented. He’s shivering even though he’s bundled up in several layers of robes and coats.

Davos heaves a sigh. “If I don’t bring you back, the monks will come find you and carry you back, again. And beat you, again.” They had drawn blood the last few times. Davos had helped Danny clean out the wounds.

Danny turns away, stares down the path. “I can’t stay.”

“There’s nowhere to go!” Davos says, frustrated. He’s had this conversation with Danny a thousand times, along with half the monastery. “The way is closed!”

“That makes no sense!” Danny yells in English. He spins around, his hands balled into fists.

Davos eyes him. He can easily take Danny in a fight, but he can’t carry him all the way back up the mountain afterwards, so it would be pointless. He almost starts the fight anyway, just for the pure unthinking release it would bring, but instead he says, “My mother will beat me if I don’t bring you back.”

Danny looks stricken. “That’s not fair!”

Davos stares at him disbelievingly. Sometimes he doesn’t understand Danny at all.

Danny stomps around in a tight angry circle, and then throws himself onto the ground, into the snow by the side of the path. Davos half-expects him to start kicking and screaming like a small child having a tantrum, but Danny just stares up at the sky, breathing in huge heaving gasps.

“I _hate_  this place,” Danny says, and his voice is hoarse with tears. “I want to go home.”

Davos walks over to stand next to him. “K’un-Lun is the best city in the world,” he says. “You’re lucky to be here.”

Danny does scream then, a long angry shriek directed upwards at the sky rather than at Davos, but Davos steps back quickly anyway. “It’s true,” he says, “you could be dead, but instead you’re here. You’re an outsider, but now you have the chance to be better than you ever could have been in your old life.”

Danny doesn’t answer, just lies motionless in the snow, and Davos flounders. He searches for something else to say, and finally blurts, “Maybe you could even become the Immortal Iron Fist.”

“Really?” Danny says, and sits up, wiping the tears from his face. Davos has been telling him stories about the Iron Fist for weeks. It’s impossible that an outsider could ever be chosen, but Danny doesn’t know that part yet.

Davos feels the knot in his stomach start to unwind; he might not have to face his mother’s anger and disappointment after all. “Yes, but you’d have to train very hard. You’d have to beat all the other warriors.”

“I could do that,” Danny says, and then frowns when Davos snorts. “What?”

“You can’t beat anyone right now,” Davos says. “You’re very behind.”

“I’ll catch up,” Danny says, furiously, climbing to his feet.

“Fine,” Davos says, “Prove it. Race me back to the monastery.”

Danny stares at him, biting his lip, and then says, “Fine. One, two, three - go!”

They race up the path, side by side.

~

After they had left the crematorium, the afterimage of Harold Meachum’s burning coffin still floating in front of Danny’s eyes, Ward had turned to Danny with a tight smile and said, “I need a drink. You wanna get a drink?”

“Sure,” Danny had said, because whatever else he feels about Ward, he doesn’t think Ward should be left alone right after his father’s kind-of funeral. So they end up sitting at the corner table of a tiny hole-in-the-wall bar that’s almost completely empty except for the two of them, because it’s eleven o’clock in the morning on a Wednesday. Danny is still nursing his first beer, Ward is on his fourth whiskey.

Ward doesn’t seem that drunk, but he’s stopped making awkward small talk and started making sarcastic toasts to Harold, so maybe he’s just good at hiding it. Danny figures Ward has had a lot of practice at hiding things.

“To my father, the walking dead,” Ward says solemnly, raising his glass, and then snickers. “To Frank N. Stein!”

“Frankenstein?” Danny asks.

“The doctor,” Ward says. “No, the monster. No, wait -” He stops, staring at Danny intently. “You ever wonder if it was all in his head? If there never was a monster, that it was just the doctor the whole time who was murdering everyone? Destroying everyone he loved?”

“No,” Danny says slowly. “I’ve never wondered that. But - uh, I didn’t really get to read that one before - ”

He stops, but Ward finishes the sentence for him.

“Before my dad killed your parents and left you stranded in the Himalayas. Right.” Ward tosses back the rest of his drink and raises his hand to signal the bartender for another.

Danny bites back a sharp reply, takes a drink of his beer instead. It’s warm and tastes like basically nothing, shitty beer in a shitty bar, and he opens his mouth to tell Ward that he’s leaving now, but then the sour-faced bartender clanks Ward’s drink onto the table. When Ward reaches for it, Danny sees that his hand is trembling.

Danny touches Ward on the arm before he can grab the glass. “Maybe you should slow down. Don’t you have a concussion?”

Ward looks down at Danny’s hand on his arm, but doesn’t pull away, or pick up the drink, so Danny leaves his hand where it is.

“It’s not the first concussion Dad’s given me,” Ward says, then frowns, like he didn’t mean to say that out loud.

Danny’s not going to say that he’s glad Harold’s dead, not to Ward at Harold’s kind-of wake, but he is so fucking glad Harold’s dead. And maybe the cold rage he feels comes out in his voice when he says, “It’s the last one, though,” because Ward’s head jerks up and he looks at Danny like he’s seeing him clearly for the first time today, like the daze that’s surrounded him since the crematorium has finally burned away.

“Yeah,” Ward says. “It’s the last one.”

They stare at each other, and then Danny leans back in his chair, lifting his hand away from Ward’s arm. “They used to beat us in the monastery,” he says. “When we made mistakes. When I ran away. They always said it wasn’t out of anger, it was - discipline. To make us better.”

“And did it make you better?” Ward asks. There’s a whole lifetime’s worth of bitterness behind the question.

Danny used to think he knew the answer. Now all he can say is, “It made me stop running away.”

“Until now,” Ward says, and Danny flinches, stung, but Ward’s not even looking at him, he’s staring down at his untouched drink. Ward didn’t mean it as a jab, the Iron Fist who abandoned his post, just as a statement of fact: it stopped Danny from running away until now, until the first moment he could, until he ran all the way back home to New York.

And what has he found here in New York?

Danny looks at Ward, who’s still watching his drink like he can stare it into submission.

“Hey,” Danny says, “Let’s get out of here. Colleen told me about a really good curry place that’s nearby.”

Ward tilts his head, uncertain, but says, “Yeah, sure.”

He’s going to have lunch with Ward, make sure he gets some food into him, gets back home okay, and then Danny’s going to go find Colleen, and ask her what she thinks about taking a long trip home with him.

~

There’s something making a rattling noise outside, every time a fresh gust of wind whips against the rickety walls of the mountain lodge. Loose tile, maybe, Colleen thinks, or a piece of siding. She’s been listening to it for the last hour, staring into the darkness of their tiny room. Danny’s back is pressed up against hers, a warm solid weight, but she can tell from his breathing that he’s not asleep either.

They haven’t talked much in the last couple of days, since they reached the gate of K’un-Lun and saw a vast emptiness instead of a city. Danny’s been quiet and grim and hurting, and Colleen doesn’t know what to say, how to even begin the conversation. She’d imagined, over the course of their long journey, while waiting in airports and riding in buses and climbing up mountains, that once they got to K’un-Lun there would be - time. Time to shake off the bleakness that’s been dragging at her, to sort through the damage done by Bakuto and the Hand, to see if she and Danny could fit together. She had thought there would time to claw through the ashes of her life and see what could be salvaged, and instead they had found more fire, more loss.

She’s lying in the dark next to Danny, and they might as well be miles away from each other.

She can’t find the words, that’s never been her strength - but she turns over, curling up behind Danny and pressing her forehead against his shoulder, wrapping an arm around him. “Can’t sleep?”

“No,” Danny says, after a moment.

“Me neither.”

They’re both quiet, and then Danny says, “Thank you for coming here with me, Colleen.” He sounds so young and uncertain that Colleen moves closer without thinking about it, holds him as tight as she can.

“I’m glad I’m here,” she says, and hears Danny snort. “No, really, if I was in New York right now -”

She hesitates, but Danny stays quiet, listening. Maybe because they’re whispering in the dark, because Danny can’t see her face, she can be brave. “If I was in New York, I would be - lost. Empty.”

Danny tenses in her arms. “Colleen -”

“If you’re going to tell me that I’m brave or strong or that it’s not my fault because I didn’t know, then you can - you can just shut the hell up,” Colleen says, savagely. “I should have known - I _recruited_  people for them, I thought I knew who they were, who I was - and I was so, so wrong -”

Fuck, she’s crying, tears wet on her face, and Danny twists in her arms and wraps himself around her in a full-body hug. She hugs him back, hard, chokes out, “I just don’t know what do now. How can I -” Fix it, she wants to say, fix all those kids I sent to them. Fix myself. That’s what she had thought the Hand was, after all - a solution, a purpose she could mold her life around. The Hand was supposed to save her from herself, and instead they had taken everything.

“I don’t know what to do,” she repeats, muffled, into the side of Danny’s neck.

“I don’t know what to do either,” Danny says shakily, the devastation he’s been trying to hide since the gate of K’un-Lun coming through loud and clear, and shit, now they’re _both_  crying.

Colleen breathes in the dark and tries to pull herself together. She touches her lips to Danny’s neck, the skin soft and smooth below the line of his beard; it’s less of a kiss than a reassurance, the smell of him in her nose, the concreteness of his presence. Danny strokes a hand down her back, and she tangles her legs with his, tugs him even closer. She wants to say something optimistic, but she can’t think of anything that’s not a lie.

“Thanks for coming with me,” Danny whispers, his face pressed into her hair. And this, at least, she can answer truthfully.

“I’m glad I’m here.”

Tomorrow they’ll keep climbing.

~

“Why did you kill your father?” Walker asks, once they’re back in the car, weapons and ordnance acquired. She doesn’t really expect Meachum to answer, but she’s bored and she wants to see the look on his face when she asks.

He’s pretty good, she’ll give him that - his eyes dart towards her and his hands tighten on the wheel, but he recovers quickly, his expression sliding into bland amusement, that ‘I’m a rich douchebag and nothing you say touches me’ look. “The first time or the second time?”

“Oooh,” Walker says, faux-impressed. “You pick.”

He shakes his head and doesn’t answer right away, staring straight ahead out the windshield like he really needs all his focus for maneuvering through bumper-to-bumper traffic.

She thinks maybe that’s the end of it, but a minute later Meachum says, “The first time because he was a son of a bitch. The second time because he was trying to kill Danny.” Then he adds, “And because he was a son of a bitch.”

Walker smiles a little despite herself, and then all the fun drops out of the moment as a sudden suspicion bubbles up. “Was he hurting your sister?”

Her voice is too intense, too urgent, and Meachum glances over sharply. She’s the one trying to control her face now, and she’s pissed at herself, wishes she’d kept her fucking mouth shut.

“No,” Meachum says, after a moment. “Joy was his favorite.”

She pushes down the rush of relief, strikes out instead, trying to get back on top of this conversation. “So he just hurt you.”

It’s mostly a stab in the dark, but her instincts are usually spot-on for this kind of thing, and the way Meachum’s shoulders hunch, just for a second, confirms it. He doesn’t say anything, no snappy come-back tossed back at her, and they drive in silence for a long time, inching their way through the traffic.

“I didn’t kill my stepfather,” Walker says, at last. “I would have, but the fucker went and died before I got the chance.” It’s the only peace offering she has.

Meachum doesn’t look away from the road, but some of the tension eases out of him. He says, “That’s too bad.”

“Yeah, it is,” Walker says. This time the silence lasts all the way back to the city.

~

Danny wakes up late. It’s hours past daybreak, and when he wanders out of his bedroom to the small kitchen and common room, he sees a note from Ward on the table, just the scrawled word _Beach_. He and Ward usually wake up around the same time - they’re both early risers from long habit - but Danny had been practicing with the guns yesterday. He’d made Ward take a video of him firing at a target, guns and hands glowing gold, so he could send it to Colleen and let her know that her advice had worked. Channeling that much chi always wears him out though, and he’s been sleeping for nearly twelve hours.   

After he shovels some food into his mouth and pulls on a sweatshirt and shoes, he leaves the guesthouse and makes his way to the beach, walking down the staircase that winds among Otaru’s beach houses and over the rocky slope to the shore. The beach is nearly empty; it’s still too early in the season for many visitors, and this morning is particularly gray and chilly. There are a few plastic chairs shoved into the sand not far from where the staircase ends, and Ward is sitting in one of them, his jacket zipped up to his chin and a pencil in his hand, leaning over a notepad that he’s got propped on the arm of the chair.   

“Whatcha doing?” Danny asks, dropping into the chair next to Ward.

“Nothing,” Ward says, fast, and covers the notepad with his arm.

Danny raises an incredulous eyebrow, and Ward flushes but doubles down with, “None of your business.”

“Okay,” Danny says pleasantly, and stares out at the lapping ocean waves like he can’t tell that Ward is huffing and rolling his eyes next to him as though Danny is the most annoying human being on the planet.

“Just - doodling,” Ward says.

“Cool, can I see?”

“No.”

“Hey,” Danny pokes Ward’s shoulder, “hey, remember when you drew Pikachu on my cast for me?”

“No,” Ward says, but he’s trying not to smile.

“Yeah, you do, come on,” Danny says, grinning, and pokes him again.

“God, fine, whatever,” Ward says with an aggrieved sigh, batting Danny’s hand away and shoving the notepad at him. “Here.”

Danny flips through it slowly. There’s about ten pages of drawings; at the beginning, mostly random sketches of shapes with no obvious form, although Danny recognizes a block of geometric patterns as the design of the windows in Harold’s penthouse. The later pages contain more obvious images - rough outlines of buildings they’ve seen on their trip, two birds pecking at the ground, the profile of a woman that Danny thinks is Bethany, and a detailed, almost schematic looking rendering of one of Orson Randall’s guns. The final picture, half-finished, is of a fierce bearded figure in a long coat brandishing the guns, and Danny thinks, _wild west gunslinger, neat_ , before recognizing himself with a jolt.    

“Hey, that’s me!” Danny says. “That’s awesome! Ward, these are great.”

“It’s nothing,” Ward says. “It’s just to - to keep my brain busy, you know?” Danny looks over, and Ward is staring down at his hands, something stiff and unsure in the set of his shoulders.

“You know what I think?” Danny says.

Ward gives him a wary glance. “What?”

“I think you should draw more of me,” Danny says, very seriously, and then ducks away, laughing, as Ward cracks up and tries to shove him out of his chair. He jumps to his feet before Ward can knock him over, catching his balance on the damp uneven sand. “You know what else I think? I think I can beat you to that giant rock.” He points at the large rock formation at the far end of the beach.

Ward shakes his head, still laughing, but gets to his feet. “Oh, you’re on.”

“Wait, wait, one sec, no cheating,” Danny says, putting the notepad carefully on the chair.

Ward takes off his jacket and drops it in the sand. “Hmm, when was the last time you won a race against me? Oh, yeah - never. I don’t have to cheat.”

“I was a lot shorter then,” Danny says, bouncing on his toes. “And you’re a lot older now.”

Ward narrows his eyes at him. “How’s your leg today?”

“It’s _fine,_ ” Danny says with an eye-roll. Ward gives him a look, and he amends, “It’s better, really. Don’t worry.”

“Good,” Ward says, warm and sincere, and then says, “One, two, three - go!” and takes off down the beach.

“Ward, you jackass!” Danny yells, tearing after him, laughing again. After a few seconds he catches up, and they run the length of the beach side by side.

~


End file.
